Defense Department turns software bug hunts into games

In the DARPA game FlowJam, players connect blocks to get electricity flowing. What you’re really doing is looking for flaws in software.

Finding flaws in software isn’t easy. With big programs having millions of lines of code, hunting down the one needle in the haystack that could make an application vulnerable to hacking is a massive chore.

So DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, decided to make a game out of it. Actually, the Department of Defense agency has made 5 games and placed them on the Web for you to play.

According to Computerworld, DARPA’s Verigames is actually a clever front end for a hunt through open-source code used in DoD applications. The agency wants the public to find flaws in the code before the bad guys do.

The games use the inspected code as data to generate objects with which players interact.

From the Computerworld story:

In Xylem, for instance, the user explores a never seen-before tropical island and catalogues unusual plants — which are actually representations of sections of code — by writing short descriptions about them.

In another game, called CircuitBot, the user links up a team of robots to carry out a mission. Flow Jam requires the user to analyze and adjust a cable network to maximize its throughput.

As players work through the games, the code is annotated and checked for issues. Right now, Verigames only works with apps used by the Defense Department, but eventually the site could be used to check commercial software as well.

Given recent revelations regarding the NSA and other government agencies collecting online information from ordinary Americans, the Verigames initiative might set the skin under your tin-foil hat tingling. Certainly, this would be a case of play at your own risk, but a cursory run through a few of the games found them to fun and engaging. Most require the Unity Web Player, a well-known plug-in for running 3D games in a browser. One of the games, Xylem, runs only on an iPad.

If you want to play one that does not require the downloader, check out FlowJam.